Friday 16 March 2018

Winning The Cool War

If there is a Cool War, then it is very definitely being lost by Gavin "go away and shut up" Williamson. And those words were in his script. Yes, really.

You will not have heard it on the BBC, or read it in The Guardian, but Britain has blocked a UN Resolution calling for an international investigation into the Salisbury attack. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has libelled Vladimir Putin outside parliamentary privilege. Putin should sue. Again, yes, really.

Putin should also promise to match the £48 million that Williamson promised yesterday for, of course, the chemical weapons programme that Britain already had but had not been declaring. Not for the British Ministry of Defence, obviously, although heaven knows that those nominally in its care could do with it.

Rather, for causes identified via the RT flagships Going Underground, Sputnik and The Alex Salmond Show. The existence of each, never mind all, of those is, like the employment of Max Keiser or Larry King, a standing rebuke to any charge of being a propaganda channel. Compared to what? The BBC? Where on that are the stories and people covered on Going Underground, or on Sputnik, or on The Alex Salmond Show?

In association with Stormzy, because there is no cooler warrior than he, Putin should begin by securing the fire safety of tower blocks comparable to Grenfell Tower, a cause on which this Government has yet to spend a single penny piece. Grenfell Tower also received only the latest and most cursory of visits from Theresa May, who refused to meet any of the survivors.

Contrast that with yesterday's heavily stage-managed visit to Salisbury, where she looked happier and more radiant than anyone had ever seen her in the course of her public duties, where she received a bouquet that was either unvetted or the whole thing was an act, and where she engaged in a fist bump that would have caused the official media to explode if Jeremy Corbyn had done it.

An early General Election? If she went for one, then hers would still be the largest party in the resulting hung Parliament. But if she waited until 2022, or even only until well before that, then Corbyn would by then have been proved as right about this as he was about Kosovo, about Afghanistan, about Iraq, about Libya, and about Syria.

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